The Bourne Legacy
★★

It’s a daring thing to try creating a sequel without your title character. But the verve needed to make The Bourne Legacy does not extend to to the final film.

Writer / director Tony Gilroy deserves credit for a simple, clean premise: the government program that Jason Bourne belonged to was involved in making a whole series of super spies. The film opens with one of these agents, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), in training in Alaska. Back in Washington, Jason Bourne is continuing to cause enough problems that the spy masters decide to erase the entire program. One set of drone-launched missiles later, and Cross is a marked man.

Despite the simplicity of that set-up, the film takes a long time to get to that point. And once it’s going, the film sputters at best. Cross escapes his training grounds (by way of a large hole in the script), and then heads to the continental US to find Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a scientist involved in the super spy program who doubles as a damsel in distress. The program shut-down includes all eliminating the scientists, too. In one of the movie’s best scenes, Cross rescues Shearing, and the two form an alliance of convenience.

Renner and Weisz both give believable performances, but neither has a character that you love and want to succeed. Cross’s motives are only slightly more sympathetic than a junkie looking for his next fix.

Legacy keeps up one of the strengths of the series: the fight scenes. These cook. But these exciting scenes are surprisingly few and far between. There’s a lot of scenes with little plot or character development that try to generate tension with people standing, urgently. Composer James Newton Howard deserves praise for keeping the pace going with his music when there is so little happening.

The idea had potential, and the cast and crew did a lot right. It was at the script stage where, in the words of the theme song:

Oh baby, oh baby
Then it fell apart, it fell apart
Oh baby, oh baby
Then it fell apart, it fell apart